POLITICIANS ARE FRIGHTENED TO MENTION THE CLIMATE.
As our world heats up, the US weather agency NOAA warns that the North Atlantic is facing an “extraordinary” hurricane season in 2024. Twice as many major storms are predicted to strike the region compared with the long-term average, many of which will bear down on Florida, which has already been suffering from the consequences of extreme weather. It’s possible – you might say appropriate – that one or more of these destructive storms might hit Palm Beach, and the Mar-a-Lago home of Donald Trump, the man whose cavalier attitude to global warming threatens to speed environmental destruction. He had a receptive audience with America’s oil barons in Florida the state in the front line of climate change. You might be disgusted but not shocked to hear reports that Trump is offering to tear up existing environmental rules for the benefit of big oil in exchange for $1 billon to shore up his coffers (which are haemorrhaging cash due to his legal troubles). For Trump and much of the American right, climate change is something dreamt up by China to undermine the US oil industry. The industry itself knew 50 years ago that its products were making our planet burn. It doesn’t care. It exists to pay its executives and shareholders vast sums money. If you want to talk about hood-winking the electorate and protecting it from harsh realities, one need look no further than the impending climate catastrophe. No major political party with designs on forming a government is addressing this. None paints the full picture …. none articulates the price of business as usual ….. none delivers the simple brutal message that we, as a society, can simply not go on the way we are. And quite frankly, who can blame them? There is an absence of political leadership since electorates the world over seem more than content to be deceived. We are all living in a fantasy world. Zelensky has had the disaster of war forced upon him which has lead to an environmental catastrophe for his country.
